Hacker News Reader

Comment by makerofthings | Hacker News Reader

It’s how you fire people in tech companies. You put them on a PiP, give them some tasks to do and then fire them when they don’t deliver. Obviously nobody survives the PiP because for an engineer not on a pip, taking 9 weeks on an 8 week project is pretty good, but on a pip 9 weeks for an 8 week project is a failure to deliver and you’re out. Obviously this is evil bullshit, but I’ve been in this industry for a very long time and this is what seems to happen.

View on HN

That's not how you fire people in tech companies. Not all tech companies are Faang/American. I've been working in several "tech companies" in Europe and it was not a thing. Let's not normalise this awful, inhuman process like there is no other alternative.

It's a documentation process. All companies have a documentation process when they want to terminate an employee. Every single one.

The objectionable part is the magnitude, not the subject matter.

This is certanly a thing in European companies as well, especially since the employment law demands more paper trail for each firing.

It's just named differently and adds more paperwork (more performance warnings, "talks" with your manager, etc.) before you get terminated.

> Obviously nobody survives the PiP because for an engineer not on a pip

I can't speak for other companies but I work at Google and I've met several people over the years who've confided with me that they've been on PIP (either in the past or at the moment when talking to me). While (thankfully) I haven't been on PIP myself (yet!) so I can't speak from personal direct experience, I can confidently say that all the people I know personally that were on PIP have successfully re-focused their career, haven't gotten fired, and are still working at the company years later.

Obviously it might be survivorship bias and I might simply not be meeting those that do not succeed, but at least I can confidently say that being put on PIP itself is not necessarily just an excuse to get you fired.

It was a bit of a blanket statement from me, I’m sure people do survive in good companies, but this is a genuine observation. I’ve never been anywhere near the bottom of the ranking. So I have, over the years, been dragged into a lot of conversations about the people who do end up at the bottom. I’ve heard “Don’t worry, we’ll PiP them out” more than once.

I worked with several people at Amazon that were on a PIP and were able to move past it. (They were also people that were both talented enough to be successful in their roles, but needed a nudge because they were not meeting expectations at the time.)

I think we generally do not hear about the cases where a PIP was used and the employee was genuinely not meeting expectations, or when a PIP was used and the employee course corrected and went on to have a successful career.

I think it it depends on the company and manager. I got a PIP once (at a FAANG, in the US), and it really felt like my manager had put a lot of effort into designing something that was achievable and customized to my situation. "Passing" the PIP would have required only a slight ramping up of my admittedly very low performance at the time.

My manager either wanted me to start doing my job again, or leave and create a space on the team for someone who would. He seemed slightly biased in favor of keeping me on the team. It didn't seem like a fun situation for him to deal with at all.

I ended up leaving, but it's because I was disengaged and didn't see a way out of it. (And I had great offers elsewhere.) Not because my manager was being abusive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com